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By Azam AhmedTHE NEW YORK TIMES • Tuesday March 12, 2013 7:08 AM

MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan — On the surface, the Gul sisters seemed to have it all: They were
young, beautiful, educated and well-off, testing the bounds of conservative Afghan traditions with
fitted jeans, makeup and cellphones.

But Nabila Gul, 17, a bright and spunky high-school student, pushed it too far. She fell in
love.

Her older sister, Fareba, 25, alarmed at the potential shame and consequences of Nabila’s
pursuit of a young man outside of family channels, tried to intervene. Their argument that November
day ended in grief: side-by-side coffins, both dead within hours of each other after consuming rat
poison stolen from their father’s closet.

Interviews with family members and government and hospital officials here reveal a tragedy of
miscalculation: Under pressure from her older sister to halt communication with the boy, Nabila
tried to eat just enough poison to scare her family but not kill herself. But she misjudged.
Overwhelmed by guilt and grief, Fareba followed by taking her own life on the doorstep of a city
shrine.

The sisters’ deaths shattered their family and have struck a chilling chord for the residents of
Mazar-i-Sharif, a city increasingly marked by the despair of its young women. For many, the deaths
have come to symbolize a larger crisis: a wave of suicide attempts.

Although the government says it does not collect data on these cases, the city’s main hospital
says it has been overwhelmed, with three or four such patients coming in every day, up from about
one or two a month a decade ago.

The number of attempts has grown with such speed that the head of investigations for the police,
Col. Salahudin Sultan, says he no longer can follow up on them.

As for the questions of why, there seem to be many theories. Most explanations focus on Mazar’s
status as an affluent, cross-cultural hub, relatively more liberal. While Afghan girls here
regularly are exposed to the social norms of the West through television and the Web, the fact is
that they live in Afghanistan’s conservative and male-dominated society. The clash is cruel.

“Most of the girls don’t die, but they all take poison or at least threaten to kill themselves,”
said Dr. Khowaja Noor Mohammad, the head of internal medicine at Mazar-i-Sharif Regional Hospital. “
This is their cry for help.”